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Review and summaries: The History of Jacques Andr´e: Introduction Typographic Writing — The 20th century This is the last volume in the series created by Yves Volume 2 (ch. 1–5), from 1950 to 2000 Perrousseaux, on the “History of Typographic Writ- Charles Bigelow ing” from its beginning to the end of the 20th century. In the 20th century, the powers of social and Histoire de l’Ecriture´ Typographique — le XXi`eme informational functions of writing, previously distin- si`ecle; tome II/II, de 1950 `a2000. Jacques guished in part by their modes of production — for Andr´e,editorial direction. Atelier Perrousseaux, example, public inscriptions and signage, book and Gap, France, 2016, ISBN 978-2-36765-006-7, news publishing, and personal handwriting — were http://tinyurl.com/ja-xxieme-ii. 364 pp., expanded by technological advances. Commercial, 391 figures (illustrations, photos, diagrams, etc.), governmental, political, and educational institutions illustrated end papers. Also available as an ebook. used typographic media to ever-greater extent and The book is in French. Volume 1 (reviewed in effect, although individual expression remained, for TUGboat 38:1) covers the years 1900 to 1950. a time, limited to handwriting and typewriting. By Occasional commentary below by the reviewer is the end of the century, however, new technologies of placed in square brackets; the main text summarizes vastly enhanced the power, extent, and the original writing. graphical range of personal written expression. This second volume of the history of 20th cen- tury typography is intended for general readers in- terested in the history, art, and technology of the century, as well for specialists and students in the field. It has been written by ten different authors and thus reflects as many different perspectives and styles. In addition to text and copious illustrations, it includes an extensive bibliography.

1. Alice Savoie: Typography transformed: the era of photocomposition (La typographie pleine mutation: l’`erede la photocompositions) “Photocomposition before 1945: false starts and early experiments.” In the early decades of the 20th century, sev- eral inventions applied photography to type setting. Despite clever mechanisms and novel names, the Bawtree, Photoline, Rotofoto, Thothomic, and Uher- type proto-phototypesetters proved less efficient, less economical, and lower in quality than established hot-metal composing machines and hence failed to become commercially successful. This first phase of a æ A Æ b photocomposition B was followed by the so-called “first c C d D generation” photocomposers — the Intertype Foto- setter and the Monophoto, which adapted hot-metal e E f machines by replacing the casting unit with a photo F g G unit. These machines produced commercially ade- h H i I quate output, j but were not widely used. “Second generation” photo-electronic systems, J k K l especially L the pioneering Lumitype invented in France m M n in the N 1940s by Moyroud and Higonnet but devel- oped in the U.S. as the Photon (sold in France as the o œ O Œ Lumitype), p revolutionized text composition in the P q Q 1960s r and 1970s. Third generation phototypesetters R s were S based on cathode ray tube (CRT) imaging and End paper (fragment): Apple Chancery and computer control, and fourth-generation machines t typography both by Kris Holmes. T were u based on laser imaging. U v w W Charles Bigelow x X y Y z Z & TUGboat, Volume 38 (2017), No. 2 275

The revolution was not merely of type designers. There is hardly a new family of technical but also social. Fast typing abilities on sans- types today that does not owe a debt to QWERTY keyboards (AZERTY in France) coupled , whether overt or unacknowledged.] with quick learning of computer mark-up codes and As phototype achieved commercial success in commands replaced the mechanical skills learned the 1960s and 1970s, more firms commissioned and from long apprenticeship in hot-metal type technol- developed original for photocomposition. ogy. “Photocomposition enabled the type-compositor At Monotype, John Dreyfus commissioned new photo to trade the blue collar laborer’s shirt and noisy, text faces by Frutiger, Jose Mendoza, and Chris heavy machines, for the white collar office shirt and Brand. At Linotype, Mike Parker commissioned precision knives and photochemical processes.” new script faces by and Hermann [CB: Thus began a trend toward higher educa- Zapf, as well as new types for Arabic, Hindi, Hebrew, tion and social mobility for typographers, women Greek, and other non-Latin alphabets. and men, reflected academically, first in the award- Foreseeing typeface piracy in the photo era, ing of Bachelor’s, then Master’s, and most recently, Charles Peignot, with Stanley Morison, Jan van Ph.D. degrees in typography, supplanting the exclu- Krimpen, , and others, formed the In- sively masculine apprenticeships of older generations ternational Typographic Association (l’Association of typographers.] Typographique Internationale, ATypI) to promote intellectual and artistic property protection for type- 2. Alice Savoie: The creation of new face designs. Several American photocomposing ma- typefaces for photocomposition (Concevoir de chine manufacturers prospered by developing cheaper nouveaux caract`erespour la photocomposition) and faster machines but plagiarizing typefaces, rely- The designs of and Ladislas Mandel. ing on lack of American copyright for type designs Phototypesetting machines transformed not only [still the case] as well as weak or absent protections the process of composing texts but also the process in other countries. of making type. Type ceased to be miniature Beginning in the 1970s, the International Type- metal sculptures and instead became abstract photo- face Corporation commissioned new types and mod- graphic images, requiring new techniques and often, ernized versions of traditional types for photocom- new designers. position. New ITC types by designers Ed Benguiat, In 1953, Charles Peignot, director of the De- Hermann Zapf, and others were licensed by many berny & Peignot foundry in Paris, hired a young photo and digital composing machine manufacturers Swiss designer, Adrian Frutiger, and assembled a and found wide popularity, especially in advertising team that included Ladislas Mandel and Lucette and display typography. Girard, to produce high-quality photo fonts for the Lumitype photo-typesetter. The team first adapted Christian Laucou: First interlude: popular metal faces like , , and Classification of typefaces and cataloging Times Roman to the strictures and distortions of of fonts (Premi`erepause: classification des high-speed optical imaging, but then Frutiger per- caract`ereset catalogage des fontes) suaded Peignot to support development of a totally As typeface variations multiplied, type classification new family of sans-serif types based on Frutiger’s became a perennially fascinating intellectual exercise. student studies at the Zurich School of Arts and Classification systems were proposed by, among oth- Crafts [where he was taught by Walter K¨ach and ers: Thibaudeau in 1921; Audin in 1929; Duvill´ein Alfred Willima]. 1931; Tschichold in 1951; Vox in 1952; Turner, Berry The result in 1957 was the astonishing Univers & Johnson in 1953; and the German DIN standard family. In the metal type era, extensive families in 1962. Most of these shared, to varying degrees, a like those of P.-S. Fournier and M.F. Benton had small set of core classes denoting text typefaces of been cut incrementally in various sizes and styles historical eras, supplemented by stylistic variations over years or decades, but Univers burst forth from mainly produced in the 19th century. Differences Deberny & Peignot all at once in 21 variations of between classification systems were partly due to weight, width, roman and italic, and all - lumping or splitting of a few classes, like the gothic ically scalable to many sizes. Typography would scripts, the numerous sans-serifs, and multitudinous never be the same again. “fantasy” display faces. [Univers was enthusiastically embraced by mod- The Vox classification was adopted by ATypI ernist graphic designers and over ensuing decades, in 1962 and remains widely used and useful, but its basic concepts were adopted by later generations new classifications continued to be proposed, in part

Review: The History of Typographic Writing — The 20th century; vol. 2 (ch. 1–5) 276 TUGboat, Volume 38 (2017), No. 2 because increasing multiplicity of type forms ren- popular that traditional type foundries created print- dered older classifications incomplete, and partly ing typefaces to imitate the typewritten look. The because perceived flaws in the logic or concepts of popular Courier, designed for IBM electric typewrit- previous systems spurred new efforts. Bringhurst, ers at IBM in 1956 by Howard Kettler, was based on in 1992 and later, utilized art historical nomencla- geometric slab-serif types. Sans-serif, italic, ture as well as biological taxonomy to articulate and all-capital typewriter faces were also produced. aesthetic-conceptual relationships of type forms. In A deficiency of the typewriter was that it pro- commercial type sales, marketing and advertising, duced “one-off” documents that were not easily repro- categories based on usage, context, and emotion have ducible. A few carbon paper copies of lesser quality appeared in type catalogs, specimens, and web sites. than the original could be made while typing, but Classification of non-Latin typefaces, such as Chinese mimeography, offset , and photocopying or Arabic, posed additional difficulties because of cul- were used to reproduce typewritten documents in tural and historical distinctions not always shared greater quantities. with Latin typography. The ubiquity of the typewriter, its conceptual [In the classification systems cited above, the simplicity, its standardized keyboard, and its vast number of different classes ranges between 5 and 22, number of users led to adoption of typewriter-like with average and median both around 10. Because input for other systems including Telex, Teletype, of the vast proliferation of type forms in the digital Varityper, and Justowriter, as well as computer in- era and type usage by billions of computer and smart put using paper tape perforated by keyboard typ- phone users, type classification has become a nexus ing. Computer output also predictably produced of modern Internet culture, inviting further analyses typewriter-like printing. When CRT monitors and of font features and classes, whether logical, semantic, keyboards began to be used for computer input, the or pragmatic.] dot- characters displayed on screens resembled, more or less, monospaced and monoline typewriter 3: Jacques Andr´e: Office typography: fonts. Thus, the typewriter became one of the earli- typewriters, printers, and “strike-on” fonts est, longest enduring, and most important paradigms (Vers la typographie de bureau: machine `a´ecrire, in human-computer interaction. imprimantes et caract`eres`aimpact) Adoption of typewriter-like computer input also Following their invention in the 19th century, type- spurred standardizations of the numerical computer writers proliferated in the 20th century. Keyboard codes corresponding to letters and characters, result- layouts varied by manufacturer until standardization ing in ASCII (American Standard Code for Infor- of a few layouts according to country or language, mation Interchange), European ISO Latin, and IBM like QWERTY in the U.S. and AZERTY in France. EBCDIC character encodings. Stringent technical For ease of use and mechanical simplicity, typewriter limitations and typographic simplicity did not, how- typography was graphically simplified. Most type- ever, totally suppress artistic ingenuity. Typewriter writers had monospaced fonts and a single type size. and “ASCII art”, made with monospaced typewriter Only a few sizes were available.1 or computerized typewriter-like characters, included When a key was struck, a character image on a a plethora of often playful and ingenious images and moving type bar impacted an ink-impregnated ribbon patterns. and squashed the character image onto paper. Because of wear on type from the very high number of repeated impacts and coarsening of let- Christian Laucou: Second interlude: Games ter images from ribbon squash, typewriter typefaces with letters (Deuxi`emepause: Jouons avec were usually monoline and based on sturdy designs, les lettres) particularly slab-serif faces. Typewriters became so In the Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic writing traditions [Chinese and Japanese could be included], scribes 1 [CB: Also called "fixed-pitch" or "fixed-width" fonts, as used in this footnote. All characters have often played with the arrangement and shaping of identical widths, for example, the letter ‘i’ in its letters to make pictorial, ornamental, or scholarly space has the same set width as the letter ‘m’ in its arrangements of text. This tendency continued into space. In the U.S., the most popular standard size European typography with the Hypnerotomachia was traditional English "", with a height of six Poliphili printed by Aldus (1499), an edition of Cal- lines per inch when single spaced vertically, and 10 characters per inch horizontally. The smaller "elite" limachus by Henri II Estienne (1577), and the poly- size set at 12 characters per inch but usually at the glot Bible by Christophe Plantin (1572). Rendi- vertical "pica" line spacing.] tions of pictorial typography include the mouse’s tail

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4. Thierry Goutten`egre: Transfer (La lettre transfer) Beginning in the 1960s and continuing for three more decades, transfer or “rub-off” lettering provided a handy and affordable means of typographic com- position for graphic designers, architects, fashion designers, engineers, and others needing easy access to limited amounts of typography. Transfer letters were based on the method of decalcomania (“decal” for short, an image-transfer method invented in France and exploited in 19th century England for decorating pottery). The 20th century innovative rub-off letters of Letraset, Alfac, Mecanorma, and other firms were screen printed with an adhesive onto a substrate from which the letters could be hand-transferred onto paper or other surface by careful rubbing. Although rub-off let- ters began with selected traditional typefaces, the “fonts” quickly expanded into realms of bold faces, fantasy forms, shape distortions, radical expressions, and graphical explorations barely imaginable and commercially impractical in the previous, traditional metal type era. The wild florescence of rub-off display faces be- gan to fade at the end of the 1980s as digital typog- raphy increasingly provided more accessible, econom- ical, and powerful means of typographic composition. It is unclear how many of the rub-off designs transi- tioned into the digital era. in Alice in Wonderland, poetry by St´ephaneMal- 5. Jacques Andr´e: History of digital font larm´e,Calligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire, and technology (Histoire technique des fontes avant-garde compositions in several “isms”, includ- num´eriques) ing Dadaism, Futurism (both Italian and Russian In the 1950s, typography moved from metal type and variations), and De Stijl. photo-type to the abstractions of digital computing. These experiments in the early part of the 20th Newly vectorized forms of letters, numbers, and dia- century were later followed by typo-pictorial com- grams began to be traced with computer-controlled positions of poetry and prose under the banners of electron beams on phosphorescent CRT screens. Lettrisme, “po´esiesonore”, “po´esieexperimental”. Similar information was also used to draw im- [Similar manifestations appeared in works from ages with electro-mechanical plotters on paper or OULIPO (Ouvroir de litt´eraturepotentielle), in inter- other substrates. A noteworthy compilation of vector- national “concrete poetry”, in the playful “Typo´esie” defined fonts for early computer screens and plotters by J´erˆomePeignot, in many typographic works by was published as “ for Computers” by Robert Massin, and in compositions by Bruno Pf¨affli Allen Hershey. The Hershey fonts, which were polyg- and other students of Emil Ruder.] onal because of the technology, had many forms and Following the avant-gardists, playful renderings variations — linear, cursive, and gothic styles as well and distortions of letters for semantic as well as pho- as mathematical, chemical, and other symbols. netic signification often appeared in commercial ad- In the late 1960s, machine manufac- vertising. As mentioned in chapter 3, when computer turers began to use rasterized letters — aggregations typography was limited to single sizes of monospaced of pixel elements or run-length codes — to display fonts in limited character sets, “ASCII art” (as above) text on CRT screens from which photographic film or was spontaneously generated in a kind of ad hoc com- paper could be exposed. The results were equivalent puter pointillism and was often widely distributed to analog phototypesetting but the digital typeset- because of the ease of text transmission. ters ran much faster. Also in the 1960s and 1970s,

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CRT monitors, which displayed simple dot-matrix imations of some traditional typefaces, and spline- characters, began to be widely used for computer defined letterforms were developed by Patrick Baude- data input and programming. When this screen tech- laire. The xerographic laser printer was invented nology was adopted for broad public usage in the at Xerox by Gary Starkweather in 1969 and was French Minitel system in conjunction with the tele- commercially developed for high-speed xerographic phone service, tens of millions of customers began to printing systems by 1977. read dot-matrix characters on screens. In the mid-1980s, Xerox’s innovations were imi- The limitations of low resolution digital letter tated and popularized in products like the Apple Mac- imaging prompted some designers, such as Wim intosh computer and LaserWriter printer. Xerox had Crouwel, to devise rectilinear and polygonal letter- also developed software for computer interchange and forms adapted to the restrictions of then-current output of type and pages on laser printers. Adobe computer technology, but these novel experiments Systems, founded by alumni of Xerox PARC, de- were soon supplanted by more traditional-looking veloped the PostScript description language, letter forms as digital resolutions increased. which used outline fonts of cubic B´eziercurves as In the 1960s, in the fields of computer-aided part of a general imaging model, to solve the problem design and manufacturing, there was pioneering re- of device-independent page interchange and render- search and development of mathematical descriptions ing. The first commercial PostScript printer was the and renderings of curves for computer graphics. In Apple LaserWriter launched in 1985. France, Pierre B´ezierat Renault and Paul de Castel- The spline-defined font outlines of Ikarus, Post- jau at Citro¨enadopted cubic splines for the descrip- Script, and similar systems had several advantages, tion and rendering of curved lines and surfaces. including: economy in computer file size and memory The decade of the 1970s was rich in exploration utilization, scalability to arbitrary sizes, ease of rota- of digital letter forms. Peter Karow at the URW tion and modification. The raster scan-conversion of firm in Hamburg developed the Ikarus digital type abstract mathematical outlines to arrays of discrete system, which encoded contours of letters with cubic pixels on monitor screens or page bitmaps of laser splines that could be output to computer plotters to printers raised difficult technical and aesthetic issues cut photo-masks for photo-optical typesetters, and at low resolutions. Technical issues involved tracing could be software scan-converted to rasters, run- pixels along the edges of characters and filling the lengths, and bitmaps for different kinds of digital edge-defined shapes, with the goals of increasing com- typesetting equipment. Also in the 1970s, Philippe putational speed and efficiency. [These were mainly Coueignoux at MIT and Patrick Baudelaire at Xerox solved by improved rendering algorithms as well as PARC independently used mathematical curves and by the increases in computing speed and memory splines to define letter contours for typography. At described by Moore’s Law.] Stanford University, developed his The aesthetic problems, however, proved more Metafont system for font creation and digitization, difficult because they involved aspects of human vi- using cubic splines. Also in the 1970s and early sion, mechanisms of reading, and expectations of the 1980s, a few digital typesetting machines, especially appearance of text, all less amenable to algorithmic for newspapers, used outline formats — some based analysis and hardware advances. At the laser printer on straight-line vectors and others on circular arcs — resolutions of the 1980s, all below 600 dots per inch, optimized for fast output. simple scan conversion produced letterforms in which Karow’s Ikarus system gained commercial suc- irregularities of stem weights, horizontal alignments, cess among digital typesetting manufacturers and letter spacings, and traditional detailing produced font developers. Moreover, URW itself digitized hun- texts that failed to conform to reader expectations. dreds of very high resolution fonts in the Ikarus spline The outputs were accordingly judged inferior, and format, and those, along with fonts from manufactur- there was a scramble to ameliorate perceived type ers using Ikarus, became the basis for a substantial quality. Karow was the first to address this problem; subset of the PostScript and TrueType fonts pro- in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Ikarus system duced in the 1980s and 1990s by Adobe, Apple, and used software distortion of master outlines to con- Microsoft for personal computers and laser printers. form to digital grids before scan-conversion. This The Xerox corporation played a major role in was done off-line to produce bitmap fonts. the development of digital typography in the 1970s. To its PostScript Type 1 fonts, Adobe added At the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), data to mark stems, curved bowls, vertical align- bitmap fonts were developed for the screens of per- ments, and other features, and those data were used sonal computers — the “Altos” — to display approx- to locally distort the outlines of characters prior to

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rasterization in order to impose greater regularity Second, for printers, doubling of resolutions from when the characters were rasterized for the digital 300 to 600 dots per inch reduced the more egregious grids of printers. Adobe termed these declarative irregularities in text rendering, while techniques for data “hints” but kept their implementations as trade decreasing intensity of laser beams along character secrets. Adobe’s advance over Ikarus was that Post- edges to reduce apparent jaggedness of curves and Script hints were applied on-the-fly during rasteri- diagonals, similar to anti-aliasing in which spot size zation in the printer, instead of off-line to produce was analogous to screen gray-scaling) made hinting fonts in bitmap and raster formats. less necessary or unnecessary. [Limitations on elec- The success of PostScript and its fonts engen- trostatic printing limit the effective resolutions that dered competitors, of which the most successful was can be achieved for mass-market devices.] TrueType, invented at Apple and later licensed to Mi- As computerized typography and document lay- crosoft. TrueType used quadratic B-splines instead out advanced, leaders in the computer document of cubic B´eziersplines, and procedural instructions industry faced the problem of exchanging electronic for fitting outline shapes to raster grids. documents across networks, computers, and devices, [The concept of procedural hinting had previ- which required standardization of computer charac- ously been developed in the late 1980s by the Folio ter encodings beyond the American ASCII and Euro- corporation for its F3 font technology and disclosed pean ISO Latin standards. Begun by Xerox in the to Apple early in the design of TrueType. Sun Mi- 1980s and supported by Apple, Microsoft, and other crosystems acquired the Folio F3 technology but did firms later in that decade or in the 1990s, a 16-bit not strive to promote it as a standard in competition standard called “Unicode” was to PostScript or, later, TrueType.] developed with the goal of eventually encompassing In 1989, Microsoft licensed TrueType technol- all the world’s written languages. A similar encod- ogy for its Windows operating system, igniting a ing project was begun in Europe as the ISO-10646 years-long commercial battle popularly known as the standard. These parallel projects were merged in the “Font Wars”, in which the combatants made rival early 1990s as the Unicode standard. Among many claims of technical and artistic superiority for their other benefits, Unicode brought computer character font technologies. A partial cease-fire in the Font standardization to many of the non-Latin and non- Wars came in the 1990s when former combatants European orthographies and writing systems that Microsoft and Adobe agreed on an expanded format had encountered obstacles to efficient computeriza- named OpenType, in which character outlines could tion, thus spurring development of computer-aided be implemented in either PostScript or TrueType document production and distribution. form, and which included data to support alternative and context-sensitive forms and required in [CB: Because of the length needed for the above certain non-Latin writing systems like Arabic and review of the information-packed Chapter 5 on digital the Indic scripts. OpenType, however, was promoted fonts, the remaining chapters of the book will be by the Adobe-Microsoft pair against a similar, earlier covered in the third and final part of this review. For font technology, TrueType GX that had been previ- reference, the remaining titles and authors are: ously released by Apple, so the font wars were not • “The first commercial digital fonts”, entirely over with the announcement of OpenType. by Frank Adebiaye; Between 1985 to 2000, some of the aesthetic • “Interlude: On the revival of typefaces”, problems of digital type were ameliorated in two by Franck Jalleau; ways. First, for computer screens, the algorithmic • “Everyday working fonts from 1985 to 2000”, adjustment of pixel intensities along character edges, by Olivier Jean; called “gray-scaling” or “anti-aliasing” reduced the • “Hybridization, (de-)construction, and perceptibility of jagged pixels along curves and di- quotation in typography from 1985 to 2000”, agonals. [This depended on the pixel resolutions of by Herv´eAracil; screens. At resolutions below (approximately) 120 • “Interlude: On the preservation of typographic pixels per inch, gray scaled edges looked smoother heritage”, by Alan Marshall; and but blurrier and were not as acceptable as manufac- • “Postface — the metamorphosis of typography”, turers hoped. Screen resolutions above 220 and 300 by Thomas Huot-Marchand. pixels per inch after the year 2000 effectively resolved Ending with an extensive bibliography and index.] the problem of jaggedness and irregularity of text on screen, obviating the need for hints.]  Charles Bigelow http://lucidafonts.com

Review: The History of Typographic Writing — The 20th century; vol. 2 (ch. 1–5)